This is a visual shorthand trope that makes gems identifiable on sight, often reducing gems to Palette Swaps of each other. In Real Life, there are many features that differentiate minerals, gemstones, precious metals, and organic gems from each other: hardness, smoothness, clarity, a range of possible colors, and location found. But the only feature the audience can directly see for themselves, and that most people outside of geologists are readily familiar with, is color. Therefore, gems in fiction will often be identified solely by color, with a standard set of gem-color associations dictating the types of gems. The gems may be identical aside from the differences in color.

Generally, the code is as follows:

Ruby: Red

Sapphire: Blue

Topaz: Orange (or Yellow)

Amber: Yellow (or Orange)

Emerald: Green

Amethyst: Purple

Onyx: Black

Diamond: White or clear, possibly with light blue or yellow mixed in

Gold: Yellow, orange, or tannish

Silver: Medium to light gray, possibly with a little blue mixed in (often trading places with platinum in regards to which is light gray and blue-gray.)

See also the Birthstones in the Real Life section for more.

Often these gemstones are seen together as a set of Mineral Macguffins. When it's more generalized (i.e. all red gems are rubies, all orange gems are topaz all the way down the rainbow), it's never brought up why there's so much mineral diversity in one area. If a gemstone is not the usual color, that is usually a plot relevant detail.

Played with somewhat in The Stormlight Archive, where there are ten gemstones used in Soulcasting; each gemstone can transmute a certain element, and the association is based mainly on the commonality of colour between them. In order, with colours and elements listed, the gemstones are: Sapphire, blue, any clear gas. Smokestone, black, any opaque gas. Ruby, red, fire. Diamond, white, crystal. Emerald, green, plant matter. Garnet, rusty red, blood. Zircon, yellow, oil. Amethyst, purple, metal. Topaz, brown, stone. Heliodor, golden, flesh.

Live Action TV

Kamen Rider Wizard has a set of jewelled Rings Of Power that are color-coded to each of his forms, but the gems are never actually identified as ruby, sapphire, etc.; in fact, they all seem to be variations of the same material, which is simply called "magic stone". (Except for the diamond-like Infinity Ring, which formed from his tears, or, somehow... it's magic, okay?) Fans may still use "ruby", "sapphire", "emerald", "amber", and "diamond" to describe them, however.

In an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Casey Novak catches a suspect in a lie on the stand with this. The suspect says she was born in January, but Casey notices the class ring she's wearing wasn't a red Garnet, but a blue Sapphire (the victim's ring.) It also never occurred to Casey that some schools let students choose gems based on school colors, either.

Music

Aoki Lapis is named for the Lapis Lazuli Gemstone and has a color scheme of blue and purple.

Tabletop Games

Yu-Gi-Oh! has the Gem-Knight cards (a Homage to the Elemental Hero archetype and the above-mentioned Crystal Beasts) which are named for and usually colored after a Gemstone (The exception is Gem-Knight Lazuli and maybe Gem-Knight Sardonyx) Their leader Gem-Knight Master Diamond has white armor and an All Your Colors CombinedRainbow Motif sword and background.

Zig-zagged with The Legend of Kyrandia: Book One. In addition to having all the common gemstones and colors, the game includes a variety of other jewels, as one puzzle revolves around birthstones. One of the first items the player can pick up is a bright red garnet, and the first green-colored stone the player is likely to see is a peridot. The rubies and emeralds are trickier to acquire.

Skyward Sword brought this back with the Emerald Tablet for the Forest, Ruby Tablet for the Volcano and for the first time Amber Tablet representing Yellow for the Desert.

The Wind Waker: Has the three "goddess pearls" each with a different color (red, green, and blue)

In fact this trend to have color coded stones of power in the Zelda series has been around since A Link to the Past starting with the three pendants of virtue.

Neverwinter Nights has gemstones which all follow the stock-standard colors mentioned in the description.

Minecraft: Emeralds are a conventional green, diamonds are light blue, and quartz is white. Lapis lazuli is so blue that it's used as blue dye. Redstone has a red color and appears to give off some kind of electricity or some other kind of energy.

In Last Train to Blue Moon Canyon, the gemstones Nancy must find to operate a device not only look exactly as this trope predicts, but exactly like the pictures of their type in a book Nancy acquires.

Pokιmon: The original Generation I games were Red, Green, and Blue. For Generation III, which was essentially a continuity reboot (couldn't link back to Gen I/II games, and included updated Retcon remakes of Gen I,) started with Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald.

Gen IV's Diamond Version was a pale blue.

One dungeon in Shining the Holy Ark has the player collecting different coloured gem stones to use in a Solve the Soup Cans puzzle. The only way to figure out what gem went where was were was if you knew what the stock colours of the gems where.

Sonic the Hedgehog: The Master Emerald which stands alone, is green. The Chaos Emeralds are a set of seven, only one is green and the others are differentiated by color. Given the Real Life example below they should probably be called Chaos Beryl instead.

Final Fantasy IX has the twelve birthstone jewels as equipped accessories, with their menu icons appropriately colored. Dissidia: Final Fantasy includes the same items as trade accessories, minus the Garnet and Amethyst.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door: The seven Crystal Stars that must be collected throughout this game are colored this way. The Diamond, Emerald, Ruby, Sapphire and Garnet stars are white, green, red, blue and orange, respectively. The third Crystal Star, which is yellow, is not a named after a gemstone at all; rather than being named after a yellow gem like topaz, it's simply called the Gold Star despite not being metal. The final Crystal Star is a iridescent white color that's even shinier than the Diamond Star, but it's merely called the Crystal Star rather than being named after any crystal in particular.

You could find the six gems that are explained in their description, each with the colour that it's said in the description. What's more, adding them to Socketed Equipment gives it a glow of the colour of the gem, and some of them (to be precise, ruby, sapphire, topaz and emerald) are associated with elements, adding damage of that element in weapons and resistance to the element in shields (ruby is fire, sapphire is cold, topaz is lightning and emerald is poison). The other two (diamond and amethyst) aren't, though.

The Soulstones. Mephisto's is blue, Diablo's is red, and Baal's is yellow-green.

In World of Warcraft this was averted at first and later played straight. While largely following the basic colors, the original game had unique icons for each type of gem and they were limited to specific tiers of ore deposits. With the introduction of the Jewelcrafting profession gems it not only became common to find up to twelve different types of gems in one type of mineral, but their icons were also standardized so that within a tier of gems the only visual difference is the color.

In Runescape, there are blue sapphires, red rubies, green emeralds, white diamonds, and black onyx. But there are also quest-related gems that are different in color (blood diamond is red, smoke diamond is gray, shadow diamond is black, ice diamond is light gray). Lastly, jade, opal and diamond are in ridiculously similar color. You can have a reference here.

NetHack plays this one dead straight, with a few exceptions - there's two possibilities each for turquoise and aquamarine (green or blue), and fluorite is randomly assigned either green, blue, white or violet. All gems are just "< colour > gem" until identified, so an unidentified "red gem" can't turn out to be sapphire, which is a blue gem.

Dwarf Fortress has diamonds of five colours as well as clear, and also blue, clear and pink garnets in addition to red, and so on and so forth. It assigns the standard colors to emerald, ruby, sapphire, amethyst, topaz and quite a few others, though.

In Mother Load, when you're digging underground emeralds are green, rubies are red and diamonds are white, which helps you decide which ones you should collect.

The Web GameTower Core features a puzzle involving eight colored gemstones. Each gem has a specific name, with citrine for yellow and obsidian for black.

Terraria includes purple amethysts, yellow topaz, blue sapphires, green emeralds, red rubies and white diamonds, the value, rarity and the quality of items crafted with those gems are in that same order (as in a diamond magic staff or grappling hook is superior to a ruby one). Amber can also be found but only by putting silt or slush into an Extractinator.

Web Comics

The 8 Disaster Stones in Cucumber Quest have each a color, symbol and element.

Birthstones are most popular/valuable/expensive in specific colors, and are the Trope Codifier

January Birthstone  Garnet - Deep Red

February Birthstone  Amethyst - Purple

March Birthstone  Aquamarine - Light Blue

April Birthstone  Diamond - White or Clear

May Birthstone  Emerald - Green

June Birthstone  Pearl - White or Cream

July Birthstone  Ruby - Red

August Birthstone  Peridot - Yellow-Green

September Birthstone  Sapphire - Blue

October Birthstone  Opal - White or Pink

November Birtstone  Topaz - Orange

December Birthstone  Turquoise - Blue-Green

The range of colors for some minerals is limited and the trope usually reflects that. For example:

Rubies and sapphires are actually the same material (corundum). The only difference is that rubies are the red kind, and sapphires are other colors (including but not exclusively the blue kind). The only other color besides red that gets a specific name are orangish ones calls padparadscha.

Similarly emeralds are specifically the green variety of beryl. Each other color of Beryl has its own name, blue-green is aquamarine, dark blue is maxixe, yellow is heliodor, pink is morganite, colorless is goshenite, and the extremely rare and valuable red is called Bixbite. If it's faintly green but not enough to be an emerald it's simply called beryl.

Amethyst and citrine are both quartz with iron impurities; in citrine the iron is triply ionized (Fe3+), while in amethyst it's quadruply ionized (Fe4+).

Tourmaline comes in just about every imaginable color: a tourmaline crystal is fairly likely to have several colors in different spots in the same crystal. One of the most valuable types, Watermelon Tourmaline, literally starts red, shades into colorless, then turns green just like a watermelon.

Real life diamonds with perfect structure and no impurities are totally transparent and colorless. However with impurities they can be in all kinds of colors, including red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, indigo, violet, magenta. What's more, even gray and black diamond existsnote by reaching a certain degree of saturation, leaving the only missing color white.

While theoretically possible, nobody has ever found a true violet diamond. The same impurity that grants violet color also causes gray, and so all known violets are very grayed out and muted.

Gold has many different colored alloys. White and rose gold are commonly known, but there are other possible colors, including black. Electrum (an alloy of gold and silver) can apparently be greenish sometimes. There are even blue and violet alloys, though the compositions of these alloys make their atomic structure less metallic and kind of brittle, so they're more often used as cut stones instead.

And if you make the gold into really small cross-sections, you can mess with its color without changing its composition. Colloidal gold can be pretty much any spectral color, depending on the size of the nanoparticles, and was traditionally used to make a (very expensive) deep red glaze. If you hammer a piece of gold into thin, transparent sheets and look through them, everything turns blue-green!

Enforced with jade commodities, since a lot of the finished pieces on the market are either dyed or injected with green wax. Rough jade, however, can be black, yellow, lilac, white, and even translucent. In fact, the most valuable pieces in ancient China were made of WHITE jade, green jade being seen at the time as gaudy trinkets from the barbarians to the South (that is, Burma).

Topaz is a relatively common mineral, but most of it is pretty much colorless. Saturated yellow and orange topazes are only found in a few places in the world. There is blue topaz, but it's incredibly rare to find it naturally. Two of the few places you can find them are Brazil's famous Minas Gerais mines, and Mason County in Texas. There's even a violet topaz that gets lumped in with the designation of imperial (high quality orange or yellow whose color changes slightly depending on the viewing angle), but that's even rarer than natural blue topaz.

Garnets are generally represented as deep red, but they can come in almost any color. The generic formula for a garnet's chemical structure is X3Y2(SiO4)3, where "X" is a divalent cation (such as calcium, Fe2+, or manganese), and "Y" is a trivalent cation (such as aluminum, Fe3+, or chromium). The most common garnets are in the "pyralspite" group (pyrope, almandine, and spessartine)  they all have aluminum in the "Y" slot, and are various shades of red. The second most common "ugrandite" group (all with calcium in the "X" slot) can be red, orange, brown, green, yellow, or black. Rarer (or completely synthetic) formulas with less common elements in the "X" and "Y" slots (and sometimes even replacing one or more of the silicate ions) can produce almost any other color, or (most notably in the case of yttrium aluminum garnets) no color at all.

TV Tropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy